The Chinese community wouldn't understand the word for depression if it
ran down the lines of our family tree like a fever.
If before our heads hit the ground
it was night sweats, sleep pillow talk, the hardship of our ancestors.
Call life the tooth of a canine,
your last name inheritance, the air you breathe, a scourge of ash but never the
cold blue of a doctor's office.
My name is Vanessa, I'm 20 years old, I'm an artist
that works predominantly in poetry performance and sculpture.
I'm Chinese European and I live in Auckland.
I have an anxiety disorder and often depression comes into that
and all the symptoms of that, so like mood swings
and kind of just really emotionally not not able to cope.
Call struggle just the street you grew up on,
amnesia a blood line, bones stretched separate
turning brothers, cousins, mothers into Chinese whispers.
In terms of subconsciously trying to figure it out, I think writing has been a
really good space for me to just reflect and understand.
Reading back on previous work and I'm like,
'Oh wow, like I was really depressed!'
A lot of my writing used to be consigned with like diaspora and
the themes of belonging and home,
which feeds into both like mental health and also cultural stuff.
I do a lot of performance poetry with different places or different spaces and
do a lot of sculpture that ties back into writing and performance.
There was so many things that seem so like aggressive and violent especially like in
terms of domestic objects you have a garlic crusher and you have this like
grater with all these like cerated edges and you have razors and tweezers
and all these other things that really like signify a relationship between a tool and a body.
I got really into this idea of the violence of time and the violence of productivity
to constantly be able to be productive and therefore valuable to society.
You had to be this perfect worker be in order to have value
to society, you had to be middle class, you have to be neurotypical and
able-bodied and all this other stuff in order to have value but what I wanted to
show I guess is that that structure that is telling you that is violent in itself
and that you already have value.
Moments of kids that should have done better but didn't
the need to succeed in a world you always have to prove yourself harder
than your neighbors, sometimes I think I've forgotten how to speak,
my heart a storm of swarming locusts, how hard it was the first time I told my mum
I think I need help.
How easy it is to disregard the small moments silence held it's breathe,
and waited for an answer.